You’ll see them in film,
k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys (골목길), old restaurants with
peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars (포장마차). Sometimes these images
are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the
2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries
and websites on the “last urban moon village” (마지막 달동네) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor
the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the
last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways,
with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated
with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes
with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al
2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development elsewhere.
However, this proposed project is not a
critique of urban (re)development (재개발), but an inquiry about what remains. Here and
there, amidst the gleaming office towers and high-rise apartments of Seoul and
other Korean cities, there are older neighborhoods with housing stock from
previous decades–small islands of the past. On the one hand, these represent
surplus neighborhoods for later redevelopment schemes. On the other, older
neighborhoods evoke nostalgia for the past and for what people frequently
characterize as a less alienated time. “Moon neighborhoods,” so-called because
many were constructed on squats in hills and mountains that were not thought
suitable for apartment development, remind people of the struggle and
determination of past generations. What happens to these places in the
interstices of ubiquitous housing blocks?
If we were doing this research in the United
States, the answer would be clear enough: gentrification, abandonment and
displacement, the legacy of post-War urban development that may have moved into
more hybrid strategies in a neoliberal age, but that still remains devastating
to people in working-class communities (Logan and Molotch 1987; Durington and
Collins 2019). In South Korean cities, however, “touristifcation” may instead
be the result. Rather than move into neighborhoods of older homes without access
to infrastructure and amenities, tourists visit instead to snap photos for
Instagram posts and to explore (Kim and Holifield 2022). In some cases, the
state has facilitated this process by painting colorful murals on neighborhood
walls–literally enabling Instagram-able moments. The result is a digital
gentrification without the physical displacement of people (Hartmann and
Jansson 2024).
My proposed research project is on the
way community identity is physically and digitally negotiated in older
neighborhoods that have become sites of state intervention, touristifcation and
nostalgia. My earlier work in Seoul
included places like Ihwa-dong and different neighborhoods along the old city
walls (e.g., Bukjeong Maul). These have been the targets of urban regeneration,
media representation and tourist development (Nam and Lee 2023; Yun and Kwon
2023). Older housing stock, narrow alleys and colorful murals attract location
scouts for k-dramas and film, as well as busloads of domestic and international
tourists. But people live in these places as well, people who have little to
show for the mediatization and fetishization of their communities. Yet it would
not be accurate to conclude that they are powerless against the onslaught of
touristification and hallyu media. For one, residents have occasionally risen
up against the commodification of their communities, as in the vandalism of
artistic murals in Ihwadong in 2016 (Oh 2020). In addition, as one of the most
wired nations on Earth, Koreans engage in social media productions across
multiple platforms, and document their neighborhoods and their lives in ways
that diverge significantly from the Instagram posts and hallyu tours. Finally,
communities host events, gallery shows, media broadcasts and other projects
that constitute genuine place-making, and stake a claim not only to their
homes, but additionally establish what their communities mean (Kim and Son
2017; Kang 2023).
My perspective on these negotiations is
one of multimodality, a recent, anthropological turn I have explored through
numerous articles and a recent, co-authored book (Collins and Durington 2024).
In anthropology, multimodality recognizes the anthropological practice in
non-anthropologists as they seek to document, represent their communities, and
intervene in the futures of those places. People are ultimately anthropologists
of their own lives, and I have helped to develop a methodology that integrates
this insight into a more collaborative, and more de-centered work that
considers multiple, community-produced media alongside more “official”
anthropological analysis (Collins and Durington 2015; Collins and Durington
2024). Here, I propose looking to neighborhood identity as a collaborative,
negotiated and occasionally fraught negotiation of meaning, place and identity.
My insights have been very much informed by fieldwork - in South Korea and in
Baltimore. And it’s these same insights that I propose to bring into the
classroom in a series of methodologically focused, participatory courses that
task students with documenting the anthropologies of their own communities.
What I hope to accomplish through this research and teaching will ultimately
work towards an understanding of global processes in an age where the physical
and the digital occupy overlapping spheres in the lives of people and in the
futures of communities.
Precursors
Years ago, I became interested in a general nostalgia for
the narrow streets and claustrophobic spaces of older neighborhoods, including
“taldongne” (달동네)—clusters of homes that
originated as unofficial housing in the heavy urban migrations after the Korean
War, and that are characterized by a lack of planning and infrastructure. Perhaps the
most iconic moment for me was the huge popularity of the “Reply 1988” (응답하라 1988), a nostalgic, family
drama/comedy that unfolds against the backdrop of the Seoul 1988 Olympics and
takes place in a modest neighborhood of 1970s-era homes and narrow streets. The
end of the series finds the old neighborhood abandoned and slated for
re-development–and end to a more simple time. Indeed, by the 1970s, many of the
residents of older neighborhoods were being forcibly (and even violently)
evicted, and large-scale apartment developments put up in their place. This
trend accelerated through the early 21st century with the establishment of “new town” developments radically
transforming the urban fabric of multiple South Korean cities. Predictably,
perhaps, the disappearance of these older, largely working-class neighborhoods
was accompanied by a longing for community and an appreciation for these
organic, eclectic spaces, in dramatic contrast to the huge developments that
now house the majority of people in Korea.
That
nostalgia extends across multiple media, from television and film to webtoons,
games and apps—and, of course, social media, where the search for selfies and
more aesthetic photography sends millions of domestic and international
tourists to the few, extant working-class neighborhoods in search of the
perfect pictures for their Instagram accounts. In my 2014-2015 fieldwork, I
analyzed numerous “alleyway” social media accounts, and set off with local
photography clubs (1 Korean, 1 Korean and non-Korean), taking pictures of
narrow streets, rusted grates and broken latticework. Globally, the neighborhoods
are iconic, connoting “Korea” even as their existence fades from Korea’s urban
fabric; it would be difficult to find a k-drama that didn’t have some romantic
moment set in one of these places. Yet the vast majority of Koreans have never
lived in them.
Nevertheless
some neighborhoods still remain. My previous work in Seoul coincided with a
period of relative openness in the form of urban regeneration policies that
were just beginning under the leadership of then-Mayor Park Won Soon (Nam and
Lee 2023). Through government programs, non-profits and museum exhibitions,
people in Seoul looked to these communities as something that deserved, at
least, some measure of preservation–in sharp distinction to the policies of
Park’s predecessors that had accelerated the frenetic pace of urban
redevelopment. Along with this came calls for a more textured and genuine urban
life where people might develop attachments to each other and to their neighborhoods
(Lee 2011). Along the way, new public spaces, sidewalks, and parks were all
constructed to make Seoul a more livable city.
Yet,
people in older neighborhoods must still negotiate with the combination of
touristification and gentrification that have encroached upon their lives.
Touristification in the form of busloads of people coming to neighborhoods that
were once avoided by non-residents, and gentrification in the form of up-scale
teashops and bars that have grown up in “edgy” and “artistic” areas. There are
a variety of means to resist these forces, but I became interested in the ways
that residents have utilized diverse media in order to form
counter-representations of life that contest the romantic commodification from
tourism and, to some extent, from the state. YouTube, film and podcasts are
generated alongside print magazines, gallery shows and other events in order to
give voice to residents and to underline their placemaking. The irony here—and
there are many ironies—is that, in their resistance, residents are
instantiating the very community ethos over which people and media have waxed
nostalgic.
